Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: a Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, by Fuchsia Dunlop (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008)
In 1994, British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop went to China to study for a year at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, with the underlying motive of eating “whatever the Chinese might put in front of me.” Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper describes her journey, of people and place, and best of all, cuisine, from “spicy aubergines” to “duck tongues.”
A few months later, a colleague at the BBC suggested I apply for a British Council scholarship to study in China. She helped me devise a worthy plan to investigate Chinese policy on ethnic minorities, a subject that had interested me for some time. Filling in the scholarship form, I came up with various academically convincing reasons for basing my research in Chengdu. I wanted to avoid the expatriate centres of Beijing and Shanghai, so that I had a chance to immerse myself in Chinese life and the Chinese language – never mind that Sichuan dialect is a notoriously distorted version of Mandarin. Then there was Sichuan’s location on the fringes of Han Chinese China, near the borderlands inhabited by Tibetans, Yi, Qiang, and countless other minorities. It all sounded quite plausible. But as I filled in the boxes on the form and composed my personal declaration, I must confess that I was thinking also about sweet and spicy aubergines, of a fish lazing in chili-bean sauce, of frilly pig’s kidneys and Sichuan pepper. Fortunately, the British Council and the Chinese government agreed that Chengdu was a suitable place for me to study, and they gave me my grant, a golden ticket to explore China for a year, with no strings attached. – from Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, by Fuchsia Dunlop
Publisher’s Website